Or I could have blamed my students—the boys had barely avoided being sent off to fight colonial wars in Angola and Mozambique only to discover when they got to America that they would be drafted to fight in Vietnam if they learned English. In the end, though, I had to blame myself—a dedicated career teacher or even a dedicated draft dodger would have made it work. Instead, my heart was three thousand miles away. I had been accepted for a master’s program in film production at the University of Southern California. I was ready to go, except Congress changed the rules for the Class of ’68 and eliminated draft deferments for grad school. Some of my friends talked bravely about Canada and Sweden, and I gave it some thought, but I couldn’t help noticing that none of them left. The head of the AV department at Bristol High had been a Marine cameraman in Korea. When he got wind of my story, he suggested I pay a visit to an Air Force recruiter he knew—Tech Sergeant Gallipeau.
Gallipeau seemed harmless enough, with a Pillsbury Doughboy body stuffed into his dress blues and a crooked grin that reminded me ever so slightly of Gomer Pyle’s. He enticed me into giving up my teaching gig by promising with great sincerity that I would be spending four years with a motion picture unit an hour from L.A. The son of a bitch had lied, of course. Thanks to something in the fine print about “Needs of the Air Force,” I ended up in a converted broom closet in Washington, DC, cranking out certificates of graduation for each and every attendee of DODCOCS, a semi-boondoggle Department of Defense computer school for field-grade officers. Thanks to its prototype 1937 Xerox machine, I got to singe my fingers in a pint-sized oven, baking the toner on each and every diploma. I shared one other job at DODCOCS with two fellow low-level enlisted men—keeping the massive urns in the officers’ lounge filled with enough coffee to make sure the majors and colonels didn’t snore during the lectures. I never wanted to see or smell coffee grounds again.
The experience was suffocating—pasting on a phony smile day after day for the powerful, blindly ambitious careerists who surrounded me. At the same time, my mind was being buffeted by what I could only describe as powerful forces of history. It was the summer of 1969 and Richard Milhous Nixon occupied the Oval Office. He promised in June to start bringing troops home, but more than two hundred a week were still coming home in body bags. Even more unsettling, stories started appearing in the GI underground press about an Army lieutenant named Calley being charged with the massacre of hundreds of unarmed women, children and old men in an obscure hamlet called My Lai.
I had never been able to sort out exactly what I believed about the war as a college student, even after the Tet Offensive in January of ’68 showed that the Johnson administration had been dead wrong about there being “light at the end of the tunnel.” In the spring of ’68 we learned at campus teachins how General Navarre, the French commander in Vietnam, had said exactly the same thing in 1950—four years before the Vietnamese crushed the Foreign Legion at Dien Bien Phu. As a college senior, however, large anti-war protests had left me cold. I had been put off by fellow students who came across as spoiled rich kids who couldn’t be bothered with the sacrifices our fathers had taken for granted during World War II. I was downright disgusted when these same children of privilege turned into angry mobs shouting nursery rhyme chants like “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the Viet Cong are gonna win.” Now though, I was being sucked into the anti-war movement by fellow servicemen who found My Lai repugnant and by returning combat veterans who were fed up with the senselessness of the whole enterprise, a quagmire that by June had cost 35,000 American lives. I tried to discuss the situation with my father that summer, but when you begin your aviation career as a World War II flight instructor, you don’t question authority any more than you want your own authority questioned. It was right about then that we stopped talking.
DODCOCS was supposed to be a plum joint-command assignment, but I was just as miserable as when I left Rhode Island. All I had accomplished was trading bedlam for solitary confinement, and I was still three thousand miles from California. Major Elton Toliver III, our Marine personnel officer, sported a throw-back old-school flat-top haircut like my dad used to wear. It reminded me so much of a miniature aircraft carrier that I half-expected to see little fighter-bombers taking off whenever I ran into him, which was often. He seemed to enjoy calling me into his office and telling me with a smirk how poorly I was fitting in, never missing a chance to point out infractions only visible to a gung-ho career military man—a mustache hair that had grown an eighth of an inch too long or a runaway sideburn that decided to graze my ear. My freshly shined shoes never seemed to make it to work without getting scuffed, and my belt buckle was forever wanting to slip out of alignment. Colonel Manketude, the Air Force liaison officer, started checking up on me too and was soon harrumphing at the pictures of Woodstock hanging on my broom-closet bulletin board and harrumphing again when he found a GI underground newspaper lying on my desk. A few weeks later he went positively apoplectic when I turned down a slot as a navigator/bombardier at OTS (Air Force shorthand for Officer Training School), pretty much echoing my father’s sentiments about wasting a good education when I could be earning my wings.
What Manketude, Toliver and my father failed to understand was that freshly minted navigator/bombardiers were not being assigned to the Aerospace Audio Visual Service. Toliver, a third-generation Yale graduate, seemed to take it personally that a fellow Ivy Leaguer would turn down a commission, which in turn seemed to deepen his irritation at my wispy mustache and the Air Force regulation that permitted me to raise one without his permission. A couple of mellower lifers down in the print shop took me under their wing and clued me in that the real Air Force wasn’t all spit-and-polish and square-your-corners like Headquarters Command. I should go for it, they said, if what I really wanted was to be assigned to a photo outfit. And if it meant risking deployment to Southeast Asia, so be it, I figured, so great was my fear of going brain dead at DODCOCS. The only catch was that I had no idea how to “go for it.” I was depressed as hell until it dawned on me that I was just a stone’s throw from the office of Ted Kennedy’s Air Force caseworker. I was thrilled to hear back from Mrs. Riley that they were looking into my situation, but that didn’t keep things from getting dicey.
It was in mid-November, on the Monday morning following the Second Vietnam Moratorium, that Toliver totally blew his stack, stopping in his tracks when he saw me in the hall. “Airman Leary—what the fuck are you doing wearing a black armband?”
“It’s in memory of American soldiers killed in Vietnam, sir. Forty thousand so far. Ten thousand this year alone.”
“Report to my office in one hour.”
And when I did, he and Manketude were waiting for me. “I’ve done two fucking tours over there in case you forgot. And I’d rather be killing an eight-year-old gook kid in Vietnam than having to protect my own son from a bunch of Commies landing on the shores of California or Connecticut.”
I wondered what Vietnamese naval genius Toliver knew about who could lead a fleet of sampans across the Pacific. Before I could ask, however, Manketude stepped in. “You’ve made another big mistake, Leary. You’re finished here.”
And with that he handed me a set of orders that bounced me out the front door of DODCOCS and on across the Potomac to the Pentagon itself for a temporary duty assignment (how did the Air Force come up with the acronym TDY?) at Headquarters Squadron, USAF. While the brass figured out what to do with me, Lieutenant Colonel Wippazetti put me to work painting nail heads visible only to him in the veneer paneling of his temporary office. “The reflections hurt my eyes,” he said. And then, miraculously, Senator Kennedy’s office got word that AAVS was shorthanded. Mrs. Riley made a couple of phone calls and suddenly my life jumped back on track, kind of like the movie Easy Rider—only in reverse, with a happy ending—as I headed off across the country, taking the southern route by way of New Orleans and Mardi Gras. Chuck Berry danced in my head singing “Route 66” as I headed out of Austin towards Amarillo, Texas; Gallup, New Mexico; and—on the home stretch for California—Flagstaff, Arizona. Driving my red ’64 VW down Interstate 15, winding my way through the Cajon Pass and on into San Bernardino, I felt sane and brilliant. I had crept out of D.C. in an ice storm—and now
